A visualization of token costs split between reasoning and I/O in AI coding agents

The Hidden Tax of AI Coding: Why Your Agent Is Burning Money on I/O

AI coding agents spend most of their tokens on file reads and boilerplate generation, not actual reasoning. A routing strategy using cheaper models for I/O-heavy work can cut token costs by 90%.

September 8, 2026 · 10 min · 1988 words · martinuke0
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